This Week’s Quote: “The judge said he disliked to sentence the lad; it seemed the wrong thing to do; but the law left him no option. I was struck by this. The judge, then, was doing something as an official that he would not dream of doing as a man; and he could do it without any sense of responsibility, or discomfort, simply because he was acting as an official and not as a man. On this principle of action, it seemed to me that one could commit almost any kind of crime without getting into trouble with one’s conscience. Clearly, a great crime had been committed against this boy; yet nobody who had had a hand in it—the judge, the jury, the prosecutor, the complaining witness, the policemen and jailers—felt any responsibility about it, because they were not acting as men, but as officials.” —Albert Jay Nock

This Week’s Quote: “Before September 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras…would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.” —Jeffrey Rosen

This Week’s Quote: “Creativity and innovation always builds on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society.” —Lawrence Lessig